Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

robbery, Indio and his men get away with the safe and hide out in a Mexican village. Manco double-crosses Mortimer and rejoins the gang, but the Colonel shows up and offers to help Indio open the safe without damaging the contents. By night, the gringos manage to hide the loot, but they’re caught and beaten. Indio releases them so he can escape with the loot. The bandits are wiped out in a gun battle and, in the final showdown, Mortimer kills Indio, settling an old vendetta with the bandit over the rape of Mortimer’s sister. Manco is ready to split the rewards, but Mortimer allows his partner to keep it all – all he wanted was revenge.
Background
     
    Eastwood and Leone’s second film together established Eastwood’s bankability and Leone’s reputation as Italy’s foremost action director. Even today, For a Few Dollars More has lost none of its edge and hasn’t dated at all. Eastwood, still in his poncho and chewing on a cigar, is this time a bounty hunter, giving a more interesting slant to the character from A Fistful of Dollars (where he was a drifting hired gun). And even as Leone is exalting the importance of dollars over life itself, Eastwood’s partner, Van Cleef’s Colonel Mortimer, is introducing the idea of conscience, absolution and revenge.
    But it was the villain, again played by Volonte, who really pushed the genre to pastures new. With Eastwood and Van Cleef as grim-faced, passionless killers, Volonte, as a drug-addicted, religion-fixated rapist, was the most excessive character to appear in a Western up to 1965. In fact, few since have equalled his over-the-top sadism and egotistical obsessiveness. Drugs had never featured in mainstream Westerns before and sexual assault was something that happened off screen (and even then only hinted at) – certainly not the red-tinted reverie it is here. Such explicitness, together with the paper-thin female characterisations (if mere walk-ons can be termed as such) and the macho emphasis on violence (especially a scene where Indio’s whole gang interminably beat up the two gringos) led to the film being written off as savage, misogynistic trash – acceptable in Italy, but definitely not in America, the historical heartland of the Western. Ironic, then, that For a Few Dollars More made a fortune when finally released there in July 1967.
    To many, this is Leone’s finest Western and it certainly epitomises everything Spaghettis were best at: greed and revenge, violence and betrayal, gringos versus Mexican bandidos , bank robberies, evocative music and protracted duels. When Mortimer faces Indio in the finale, in a makeshift, circular Roman arena, Leone stretches the moment before the draw to breaking point. Ennio Morricone’s triumphant trumpet theme spirals skywards and then cuts to silence as the tight-lipped protagonists let their guns do the talking.
    Having made Eastwood a star, Leone added a second hero, who effectively became the lead. For the Colonel, Leone again looked to America. After being snubbed by Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, he cast hawk-nosed Van Cleef (a Hollywood villain from High Noon [1952], Gunfight at the OK Corral [1957] and Ride Lonesome [1959]). Volonte was again cast as the villain-in-chief and German actor Klaus Kinski appeared as a snarling, twitching hunchback, who in one scene has a match lit on his hump by Van Cleef.
    The film was a fair improvement on A Fistful of Dollars . The action sequences were punchier, the gringos were almost silent, their opponents (and the rest of the supporting cast) garrulous and operatic. Morricone’s music was a considerable step forward, incorporating a twanging Jew’s harp, eerie whistling, electric guitar and what sounds like someone levering a Winchester – and that was just the title tune. A plot device (a musical pocket watch) was also effortlessly woven in, making this one of Morricone’s most intricate scores. After this movie, virtually every Spaghetti Western